priests who made out they knew the mysteries, and what God was up to.
And there were processions of girls with fruit and flowers on
feast-days, and soldiers in gold armour. All gone, even their big
notions. Their god hasn't got even a name now. Have you ever read the
_Companions of Columbus_?"

I was as surprised as though one of his dim bottles in the shadows had
suddenly glowed before my eyes, become magical with moving opalescence.
What right had old Pascoe to be staring like that to the land and
romance of the Toltecs? I had been under the impression that he read
nothing but the Bible and _Progress and Poverty_. There was a
biography of Bradlaugh, too, which he would quote copiously, and his
spectacles used fairly to scintillate over that, and his yellow face to
acquire a new set of cunning and ironic puckers; for I believe he
thought, when he quoted Bradlaugh--whose name was nearly all I knew of
that famous man--that he was becoming extremely modern, and a little
too strong for my conventional and sensitive mind. But here he was,
telling of Incas, Aztecs, and Toltecs, of buried cities, of forgotten
treasures, though mainly of the mind, of Montezuma, of the quetzal
bird, and of the vanished splendour of nations that are now but a few
weathered stones. It was the forlorn stones, lost in an uninhabited
wilderness, to which he constantly returned. A brother of his, who had
been there, perhaps had dropped a word once into Pascoe's ear while his
accustomed weapon was uplifted over a dock-labourer's boot-heel, and
this was what that word had done. Pascoe, with a sort of symbolic
gesture, rose from his bobbing foot before me, tore the shoe from it,
flung it contemptuously on the floor, and approached me with a
flamboyant hammer.

And that evening I feared for a moment that Pascoe was spoiled for me.